Straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were the largest terrestrial mammals of the Pleistocene epoch, present in Europe and western Asia between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago. A new analysis of 125,000-year-old bones of straight-tusked elephants from ancient lake deposits in Germany shows that hunting of these enormous animals was part of the cultural repertoire of Neanderthals there, over 2,000 years, many dozens of generations.
Straight-tusked elephants are among the most powerful proboscideans (elephants and their extinct relatives) that have ever lived.
The animals had a very wide head and extremely long tusks, and were roughly three times larger than that of living Asian elephants, twice that of African ones, and also much larger than woolly mammoths.
Estimates of maximum shoulder height vary from 3 to 4.2 m (10-14 feet) and body mass from 4.5 to 13 tons for females and males, respectively.
Straight-tusked elephants had a preference for warm temperate settings and has been documented in the middle latitudes of Europe mainly during interglacials, probably finding a refuge in the southern parts of western Eurasia during colder parts of the Pleistocene.
Their distribution overlapped with that of western Eurasian hominins, such as Neanderthals and earlier populations.
Several Paleolithic sites have yielded skeletal remains of straight-tusked elephants, in association with stone tools, leading to rich speculation about the nature of interactions between these large elephants and Pleistocene humans: were these the remains of scavenged animals or may some of them have been hunted, although hunting of these large animals is often considered a dangerous enterprise, with the costs possibly larger than the benefits?
On the basis of the rich material from the travertine exposures at the Taubach site in Germany, archaeologists suggested back in 1922 that Neanderthals were targeting young individuals, hunting them in pit traps there.
In 1948, the site of…
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